Chapter 13 : COLLISION COURSE
The Bertinelli warehouse on Coastal Way burned at 2:00 AM and the scanner told me who lit the match.
Not literally — the fire was secondary to the raid, structural damage from a fight that spilled across two loading bays and left four of Frank Bertinelli's men zip-tied for the SCPD. The scanner chatter was frantic: responding units, fire suppression request, a dispatcher trying to process witness descriptions that included a woman in dark clothes and a man in a green hood and arrows in the same incident report.
Oliver and Helena. Working together.
I sat cross-legged on the apartment floor with the scanner in one ear and the city map spread in front of me, marking the location with a blue X. Coastal Way was a Bertinelli storage hub — drugs, weapons, the physical inventory of a crime family that had operated in Starling City for two generations. Oliver was using Helena's inside knowledge to dismantle her father's network, and Helena was using Oliver's combat capability to hit targets she couldn't reach alone.
In the show, this partnership lasted roughly a week. Helena was patient enough to accept Oliver's no-kill rule for the first few operations, cooperative enough to learn from his tactical approach, and volatile enough to destroy the arrangement the moment Frank Bertinelli's face appeared in the crosshairs and Oliver's hand stopped her from pulling the trigger.
The timeline was holding. Coastal Way was the second joint operation — the Bertinelli lieutenant arrest from the scanner two days ago had been the first. At this pace, the partnership had four or five days before Helena's vendetta outgrew Oliver's rules.
[GLADES INTELLIGENCE: 39% COMPLETE. BERTINELLI OPERATIONAL DATA UPDATED.]
The Glades Intelligence mission tracked every scrap of criminal data I fed it, and the Helena-Oliver campaign was generating intelligence at a rate my solo operations couldn't match. Every raid they hit disrupted a piece of the Bertinelli machine, and every disruption produced public records — arrests, court filings, seized asset inventories — that I harvested from the courthouse terminal during lunch breaks.
The closet door was open. The butcher paper had grown a second layer — Helena's name with its circled WAIT sat at the center of a web connecting Frank Bertinelli's known operations, shell companies, and the construction permit trail that linked his empire to Merlyn Global. The research file on my phone held forty-seven pages of notes, cross-referenced and organized with the compulsive thoroughness of a man who'd spent six years managing project timelines before dying in a car accident and waking up in someone else's body.
"Four days. Maybe five. Then she breaks."
The certainty of it sat in my chest like a stone. Helena Bertinelli would lose her patience. Oliver would refuse to cross the line she needed him to cross. She'd attack a Bertinelli target on her own, with lethal force, and Oliver would cut ties. And then Helena — brilliant, furious, alone — would spiral into the kind of destruction that ended careers and lives, hers included.
Unless someone offered an alternative before the spiral reached terminal velocity.
I closed the closet door, hid the timeline, and started planning.
---
The Bertinelli estate sat on twelve acres of manicured property in the northern hills, so far from the Glades that the air tasted different — cleaner, sharper, absent the chemical undertone that clung to everything south of 12th Street. A stone wall ran the perimeter, eight feet high, topped with decorative iron spikes that served dual purpose. Security cameras at fifty-meter intervals, motion-activated floodlights along the east and south approaches, and a guard rotation that I'd been studying from the public road for three evenings.
I needed the security layout. Not for now — Helena wasn't at the estate, and approaching her there would be suicide — but for later. For the Undertaking timeline, when Frank Bertinelli's criminal empire became a variable in Malcolm Merlyn's calculations, and knowing the physical layout of the Bertinelli compound could mean the difference between a plan that worked and one that got people killed.
The approach was through the wooded buffer on the east side. A public hiking trail ran within two hundred yards of the property line, and the tree cover extended to within thirty feet of the estate wall. I'd timed the guard patrol from the road: twelve-minute rotation on the east perimeter, with a ninety-second window between the rear guard passing the southeast corner and the lead guard rounding the northeast.
Ninety seconds. Stealth Basic. PER 10. The math was tight but possible.
I was wrong.
The first patrol passed at 11:42 PM. I waited in the treeline, counting heartbeats, watching the guard's flashlight sweep the wall base in a pattern that suggested boredom rather than alertness. He rounded the corner. I moved.
The wall was eight feet of mortared stone with iron spikes. I wasn't climbing it — the plan was to reach the wall, photograph the camera positions from ground level, and map the blind spots where the floodlight coverage overlapped imperfectly. Three minutes of close-range reconnaissance, then back to the trees before the next rotation.
The Stealth skill guided my feet through the leaf litter — toe-heel, weight distributed, avoid the dry patches. PER 10 tracked the ambient sounds: the distant hum of the estate's generator, a dog barking somewhere inside the grounds, the crunch of the guard's boots fading around the northeast corner.
I reached the wall. Pulled out the phone. Angled the camera upward toward the nearest security mount.
The floodlight hit me like a physical blow.
White light, instant and total, activating from a sensor I hadn't seen — recessed into the stone, below eye level, positioned to catch anyone approaching the wall base within six feet. The darkness exploded into daylight and I was standing in a column of illumination visible from every angle on the property and probably from low orbit.
I ran. The treeline was thirty feet away and every foot of it was lit like a stage.
Shouting behind me. Two voices, close, the rapid footfall of men trained to respond to perimeter alerts. The click of a weapon being chambered — not a handgun, something with heft, the industrial sound of a pump-action shotgun cycling a round.
The trees were ten feet away. I could see individual branches, the shadow line where the floodlight's reach ended, the darkness that meant safety.
The shotgun blast caught me in the back.
Not a slug — buckshot, spread pattern, the kind of load designed for close-range deterrence. It hit like a wall of burning fists, each pellet punching through the jacket and into the tissue underneath. The force threw me forward — a staggering, graceless lurch that covered the last eight feet to the treeline before the legs quit and the ground arrived and the world went sideways.
Pain. Not the sharp, focused agony of the knife at 4th and Rackham. Not the brief, spinning terror of the rooftop fall. This was distributed — a constellation of impacts across the upper back and shoulders, each one a separate fire, the cumulative effect a roaring furnace that made breathing an act of rebellion.
The second shot didn't come. I was past the treeline. The guards were shouting at each other — procedure, probably, the protocol for an intruder who'd entered the tree cover where shotguns became less effective and pursuit became risky.
I crawled. Ten feet. Twenty. The pain was extraordinary and the body was shutting down, blood pressure dropping, the peripheral vision narrowing to a tunnel. The phone was gone — dropped when the blast hit, lying somewhere in the lit ground between me and the wall. The crowbar was still in my belt, jabbing into my hip with each movement, a stupid, irrelevant detail that my dying brain catalogued with the same precision it catalogued everything else.
The trees blurred. The tunnel narrowed. The last thing I thought was that the death sound was different when it was buckshot — not a single point of failure but a slow, distributed collapse, like a building coming down one brick at a time.
[DEATH RECORDED. CAUSE: SHOTGUN BLAST — MULTIPLE PENETRATING WOUNDS, UPPER BACK. HEMORRHAGIC SHOCK. RESPAWNING AT BONFIRE ZERO.]
---
Apartment floor. Three.
I lay on the linoleum and waited for the reaction. The vomiting came — lighter than the first death, heavier than the second. The shaking came. The phantom sensation of buckshot stippling across my shoulders came and stayed for eleven minutes, each impact point a ghost burning into unmarked skin.
But underneath the physiological protest, something else. Or rather, the absence of something.
The first death — the knife — had broken me open. The second — the fall — had filled me with existential dread. This one, the third, produced a clinical calm that arrived faster than the panic and crowded it into a corner. The pain was there. The memory was there. But the emotional response had dialed down, like a volume knob being turned by a hand I couldn't see.
"That's not good."
The thought was precise and dispassionate and exactly the kind of thing someone says when they're watching themselves from outside the cockpit. Death was becoming routine. The body's chemical response to its own termination was adapting, and the adaptation wasn't resilience — it was numbness. There was a word for what happened to people who stopped reacting normally to extreme stimuli, and the word was desensitization, and it was the kind of problem that crept up on you like water rising in a room without windows.
I filed it. Added it to the growing list of psychological costs I was accumulating alongside the CP and the stat points and the skill registrations. Then I pulled up the Death Echo.
[DEATH ECHO #3 — STORED. DURATION: 60 SECONDS.]
The recording was perfect. Sixty seconds of the Bertinelli estate's east perimeter captured in full sensory detail — the hidden motion sensor position, the floodlight activation radius, the guard response time (four seconds from alert to arrival), the shotgun type (Mossberg 500, based on the cycling sound), and the camera angles I'd been trying to photograph when the light hit.
The mission had failed. The intel had been purchased.
I pinned the Death Echo's security data to the closet wall beside the Undertaking timeline — camera positions drawn from memory, guard patrol timing, the sensor location marked with a red dot. Another death converted into information. Another piece of myself traded for progress.
The phone was gone — lost at the estate, lying in the floodlit kill zone. The Bonfire had reset my equipment to snapshot state, which included the previous phone. I'd need to transfer the research files from the micro-SD backup, buy a new prepaid phone, and re-download the scanner app. An hour of work to replace what ten seconds of buckshot had destroyed.
I sat on the bed and pulled up the Bonfire interface. Updated the snapshot — fresh clothes, wallet, the micro-SD card tucked into the jacket's inner pocket.
Preparation for death. Just another item on the checklist.
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